Dragon Queen

by Stephen Deas

  ‘He can call himself what he wants, can’t he?’ muttered someone. ‘As long as what he answers to is slave like the rest of us, eh?’ There was a chorus of laughter. Berren screwed his eyes shut. Skyrie was gone, wasn’t he? But there was something more than the memories of another man’s life. Something else trying to break through in his dreams of the one-eyed man.

  Another slave got up, pale-skinned Adasi who’d come from the Small Kingdoms. ‘No, Jorri. He wants to call himself the Bloody Judge, he can answer for him too.’ He walked around the coals and stood over Berren, looking down at him. ‘I had a cousin in the Tethis queensguard. The Bloody Judge killed him. That means that you and I, we got a—’

  Berren shot to his feet and wrapped an arm around Adasi’s neck. The words ended in a strangled gasp as Berren squeezed. ‘If he served the Dark Queen then he deserved what he got!’ he hissed. He was breathing hard. Rage swarmed through him, rage and revenge, demanding release. ‘So what was his name? Was it Skyrie?’ His arms clenched tighter. Why would he say that? Skyrie? How could it be?

  ‘Adasi, last month your cousin was a pirate,’ laughed someone else.

  ‘You going to let him go now?’ asked Tuuran.

  ‘And a bad one at that.’

  Then Tuuran’s arms were around Berren like iron bands. Adasi scrabbled away, off into the shadows, staring at him as though he was a monster, a madman, a freak. And at the same time he saw himself walking down into the pit under Tethis castle, four brother warlocks around him as an honour guard. He felt the hatred burning inside him as his village had burned. Revenge. That was what had taken him there. He stumbled away, out of the shelter of the sailors’ awning and into the wind. Cold fresh air crashed though him. He reached the rails at the edge of the deck and heaved the contents of his stomach into the sea. ‘Gods!’ He spat out the taste of bile and gritted his teeth. With the wind in his face and the stars up above, the memories slowly faded until all that was left was the name.

  Skyrie. He almost didn’t know who that was any more.

  ‘I don’t care who you were or who you think you are,’ murmured Tuuran in his ear. The big man had crept up on him and now he slipped in beside Berren and leaned on the rail too, looking out at the night-black sea. ‘You can be the Sun King himself for all I care but to the rest of us you’re still called slave. Do you know the penalty for damaging another slave, slave?’

  ‘A slow and painful death, I don’t doubt.’ Berren spat again.

  ‘I send you back down for another year at the oars.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘In your case I’ll make sure it’s five.’

  ‘Then I’d best start with you.’

  Tuuran laughed. ‘No one cares, slave. No one gives a drip of piss about who you were or how you got here. You’re here. That’s the only truth that matters. Everything else is slaves’ tales. You heard Vhalin speak?’

  ‘Used to be sergeant of the guard in some place I’ve never heard of?’

  ‘Sold into slavery when his town was overrun. Fought with such ferocity that when they finally took him they were too afraid to kill him, right? Whoever they were.’

  ‘So he says.’

  ‘He comes from a town you’ve never heard of because it doesn’t exist. He was a dock worker. He was sold to the Taiytakei because he couldn’t pay his debts. Found that out from another slave who knew him. Sahan the pirate? Feared throughout the Gulf of Feyr, renowned from Helhex in the south to the mountains in the north, scourge and terror of the seas?’ Tuuran shook his head. ‘Fisherman. He was a pirate but only for one night. Thought he’d row into Deephaven harbour and climb up an anchor chain and rob one of the ships. Caught first time. Sold.’ Tuuran chuckled. ‘But you wouldn’t believe it now, either of them. They made up the stories of who they wanted to be. Vhalin the Panther and Bloody Sahan.’ He turned to Berren. ‘So you can be the Bloody Judge of Tethis if you want, or you can be the emperor of Aria or the speaker of the nine realms. No one cares. Just don’t act like it makes you any better than the rest of us.’

  Berren spat into the sea. ‘Why make up stories if no one cares? They don’t change who you are. Pretty pointless, I’d say.’

  ‘Are they?’ Tuuran slapped Berren on the shoulder and spat a laugh of anger at the night. ‘We have nothing, slave. So when I dream, I am the Tuuran who faced dragons and I fight them and I win. When the time for blood-letting comes, that’s who I become and so I live and others die. But when it’s not time for blood-letting, these other slaves are what pass for your friends. So if anything happens to Adasi now, you’d better have about a hundred witnesses to say it wasn’t you and I’d better be one of them. Otherwise …’ He mimed a rowing motion.

  ‘I could throw you over the side right here and now,’ muttered Berren.

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’

  ‘I faced him once. The man who stole my life. Let’s say, for the sake of things, he was the man who burned my village.’ He stared at the sea, spilling words to the air. ‘I remember the feel of the javelin in my hand. The exultation as I threw it. I looked into his eyes and a chill wrapped itself around me like a long-dead lover. He met me, stare for stare, steady and unflinching as a stone. They weren’t the eyes of some doppelgänger. They were my own.’ He didn’t say anything more after that. Just gazed out across the water.

  ‘Never mind those other names. I think I’m going to call you Crazy. Crazy Mad,’ said Tuuran.

  And that was how things stayed. The days grew to months and the months to years and Tuuran was his friend as much as anyone until the time came when he left, summoned to some voyage to his homeland that filled him with tears and fire and a hunger to be free, and Berren was alone. Crazy Mad. Wondering what to do and waiting for the world to remember him. And remember him it did, after many months more had passed, with a Taiytakei sailing ship and three men in grey robes and one that he knew. The one he wanted most of all.

  Vallas. Vallas Kuy. Brother to the dead warlock Saffran who’d cut out a piece of his soul.

  16

  Priests of the Vul Storna

  Not that anyone in the eyrie knew or cared, but in the dragon realms the Adamantine Palace had already burned to ash and glass when the Watcher saw the moon sorcerers for the second and last time. With no warning given they appeared in the desert out of the sky above the eyrie the stolen alchemist had made. Two of them now, not three; and they came with dragons and said nothing, left the monsters behind and vanished into the sky whence they came. The Watcher watched them go and then looked once more at the paper, carefully written in a scribe’s hand, that he’d taken from the grey dead under the Vul Storna not many days before.

  For the brother who waits in grey.

  We have found him.

  Vallas

  Vallas. Now he had a name.

  The Dragon-queen

  17

  The Speaker and Her Spear

  Six months before it would burn under an onslaught of dragons, the dragon-queen Zafir stood before the altar of the Great Flame in the Glass Cathedral of the Adamantine Palace. Aruch, the cathedral’s high priest, was mumbling old words handed down from the first speaker, Narammed. Zafir hardly heard them. Her head was spinning, full of doubts and fears and possibilities and amazement. Out in the Gateyard the Adamantine Men were still clearing up the corpses. The Night of the Knives, they’d soon be calling it. The night that the riders of the north had fought with the Speaker’s Guard and left more than a hundred dead strewn across the palace. The night Shezira had pushed Hyram off his balcony to fall to his death and the night Zafir had imprisoned a king and a queen, the first t
ime a speaker had done such a thing in nearly a hundred years. The night she’d started a war.

  The Glass Cathedral was half empty. It should have been full, but many of those who had come to see the new speaker chosen were dead or underground. Aruch’s mumbling turned into a buzz in her ears. She couldn’t concentrate. Her heart was fluttering. War. She’d started a war. Maybe Jehal thought there was a way to turn back but there wasn’t.

  It took a moment to realise Aruch had stopped. The cathedral had fallen silent. The air was taut with expectation. Aruch was holding something in the palm of his shaking hand.

  ‘The ring, Holiness,’ he said again.

  Zafir stretched out her hand. Her fingers were long and delicate. Musician’s fingers, her mother had said a long time ago when they’d still been speaking to each other, before Zafir had bled her first woman’s blood and discovered the truth of what was waiting for her.

  Today her hands were shaking as much as the daft old priest’s.

  Aruch slipped the Speaker’s Ring onto her finger. He placed the Earthspear in her hand and named her Queen Zafir, speaker of the nine realms. She returned the spear and it was done. As she turned and walked away down the aisle of the gloomy windowless cathedral, she looked for Jehal, but he wasn’t there. He’d stayed carefully out of sight. He’d said he would and she understood that he had to, but she wished he hadn’t.

  Doubts. Doubts had no place in a dragon-rider but it was hard to stand alone with so much uncertainty, not knowing with each hour what would come of Hyram’s fall and the battle in the Gateyard, of dragon-kings and dragon-queens imprisoned in her towers, a blood-mage under her feet and a Night Watchman who wasn’t as obedient as he seemed. Hard, and Jehal would have made it easier simply by being there to share the burden – but he wasn’t, and she’d shambled through this ceremony like a sleepwalker, doing her part but barely aware of what was around her.

  And it wasn’t good enough. Halfway from the altar to the bright sunlight of the open door, she stopped. She slowly looked from left to right and back again, sweeping her eyes across the riders who’d come to watch her take the ring. They hadn’t expected her to stop, and now she had their attention. She looked at them, listened to the racing of her own heart and felt the writhing in her stomach and smiled. Smiled at them, met their eyes one by one and took that fear and doubt and curled a fist around it and squeezed it until it was something else.

  Anticipation. Hunger.

  It hit her, standing there, halfway along the cathedral. The queen of everything! Speaker! A rush of warmth spread through her and her smile grew wider; and now she strode the rest of the way, strutted, shoulders back, chin high, white cloak swirling behind her. She felt their eyes on her, watching her go. Once outside, she didn’t break her stride as she marched to the Tower of Air and climbed its steps to the top. The exertion left her flushed and breathless. She threw open the door to her rooms and pulled off her cloak, sure Jehal would be waiting there ready for her, wanting him to be so she could vent the tension and the anticipation and find a calm again, but he wasn’t. She searched back and forth in case he was hiding – it wouldn’t be the first time he’d kept her guessing and then crept out on her and she was in no mood for games. When she was sure he really wasn’t there, she sighed and flopped onto the pristine silk sheets and started to unlace her boots, and then stopped and threw herself back and closed her eyes because the feeling wouldn’t go away. The need for release. She shivered, filled with the memory of desire. When she closed her eyes she could smell him, his sweat, her sex.

  Riding a dragon. That would be best of all. Nothing was equal to the feeling that brought. But the dragons were down by the Mirror Lakes at the eyrie and she wanted something now.

  She sighed again and jumped off the bed and prowled to the balconies. The Tower of Air had a ring of them, up high, overlooking the palace. Maybe the swirl of the air would calm her, and she liked to be high above the ground like this. Speakers before her had liked it up here too and for the same reason: it reminded them of sitting on a dragon’s back. Perhaps that would do. She went and stood outside, high over the walls of the palace, drenched in sunlight. The day had a dreamy quality. A breeze wafted from the south, warm and dusty, drawing a little perfume from the scented silken drapes. She’d grown used to these rooms, the chambers at the top of the Tower of Air where she and Jehal had first schemed together as they’d stroked each other’s skin. The drapes were a gift from Jehal too.

  It wasn’t helping.

  ‘Holiness?’

  She jumped, so startled she almost stumbled and fell off the edge of the balcony. On any other day that might have made her furious, but today all she could do was laugh because that was how Shezira had murdered Hyram too, and how Jehal had murdered her mother, and how ridiculous would it be for yet another royal-blooded rider to fall out of the sky and dash themselves over the ground?

  She caught her breath. The sharp rush of adrenaline wasn’t helping either. Damn Jehal for his caution.

  ‘Holiness?’

  Zafir brushed the drapes aside. In the balcony room a servant knelt with her head pressed to the floor. A wild rush spiralled through her. Drag the woman to her feet and throw her out of the window. Or drag her to the bed and …

  ‘Damn you, Jehal!’ She had to laugh again, because it was that or scream or smash something. Speaker of the nine realms! Speaker of the nine realms!

  For a moment she forgot the woman on the floor. Speaker! It filled her and made her gasp.

  ‘Holiness, the alchemist is waiting to see you.’ The woman cringed every time Zafir moved, as if she expected to be kicked. And that would have been a way to release the energy coursing through her but the Adamantine Palace had seen enough speakers like that over the decades. She took a deep breath, let it out, bent very low and touched the woman lightly on the head.

  ‘Then go and send him in.’

  She’d been ready for it to be the irritating one, Jeiros, but it wasn’t, it was Vioros. When he came he shuffled slowly through the door, head bowed. He was in his finest cream quilted robes embroidered with flames at the edges, doubtless kept carefully clean in a closet in the Palace of Alchemy for such days as these. He bowed low and stayed with his head tipped towards the floor. He was out of breath. The steps got almost everyone.

  ‘Holiness.’ He spoke quietly. There was a subtle change in his tone that recognised what she’d become. Today she was the speaker. Zafir smiled, still full of that tension.

  ‘Vioros! Look at me and get on with it. I have things to do.’ Not that she knew what, exactly, but not sitting around here doing nothing, that was for sure. If Jehal was hiding then it would have to be a tear across the Purple Spur and straight down the Great Cliff on Onyx’s back to see whether she could get the wind to rip her right out of the saddle this time … Or something like that. Something to make her heart truly pound.

  When he looked up, he smiled, and Zafir felt another surge of delicious warmth. Vioros had been kind enough to her, but mostly the smile told her that her mother’s death remained a mystery to him. Queen Aliphera, fallen from the back of her dragon? No one knew what to believe but after last night, with a dragon-king and a dragon-queen in prison under the Glass Cathedral, no one would ask any more. It was gone. There were bigger things.

  She twisted at the ring on her finger impatiently, conscious of its unfamiliar presence.

  ‘Holiness, to every speaker of the nine realms, we come. There is knowledge that we of the order wish to share with you. Knowledge for your ears and yours alone. It is usually done immediately after the naming.’

  Zafir rose and paced restlessly to the gaudy throne that Hyram had brought here for her and sat down again. ‘Sit, Vioros. What knowledge?’

  The alchemist carefully sat and crossed his legs on the floor in front of her, ignoring the chairs either side. ‘Holiness, when you touched the spear you be
came the guardian of us all. There are truths known among our order that are for the speaker and no other.’

  Zafir made a show of looking about. ‘We do appear to be alone, Vioros.’

  Vioros didn’t follow her eyes so perhaps he didn’t doubt her, but he shook his head. ‘I cannot, Holiness, for they cannot be spoken. It is a thing that you must see. Please, Holiness, will you come?’

  Zafir let out an exasperated sign and slapped her thighs. All that delicious tension was turning slowly to frustration and that in its turn was making her irritable. ‘Now, Vioros? Does it have to be now?’

  ‘If it pleases you, Holiness.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’ She let out another sharp breath and snapped to her feet. Certainly this wasn’t what she wanted – what she wanted was Jehal or her dragon but neither were here and her mood was rapidly shifting. Jehal would never know what he’d missed. Even he had his limits and today, if he’d been here, they might just have found them, and Jeiros and Vioros could have waited, fuming, for as long as it took. But he wasn’t, so boring alchemists it was.

  Vioros wouldn’t say any more. She quickly left him behind, bounding down the tower steps while he toiled after. Outside, when she’d waited for him to catch up, he led her across the Speaker’s Yard and straight back into the tumorous lump of stone that was the Glass Cathedral. Jeiros was there and a few dozen riders still milling in clumps and clusters from the ceremony, talking and muttering to each other. Zafir wondered why they chose to stay in the dark of the cathedral instead of the bright sun of the yard. Conspiring probably, but they all bowed and fell silent as she passed. Jeiros bowed too. This one had begun to annoy her. He was floundering his way into Bellepheros’s shoes, still thinking that the old man might come back. Probably better for all of them if he did but the world was rarely that kind. Although if I didn’t have Bellepheros killed and neither did Jehal then who did? And why? What did that old man know? What did he find? The timing of his vanishing was the most troubling of all, right after he’d scoured Jehal’s eyrie for her mother’s killer.